


A Star's Cycle

by RedHammer



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars - The Last Jedi - Fandom, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015), Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi (2017), Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Angst, Drama, F/M, Force Bond (Star Wars), Implied/Referenced Character Death, Post-TLJ, Pure Reylo, Romance, They are both turbovirgins
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-02-05
Updated: 2018-02-05
Packaged: 2019-03-14 00:07:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,249
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13581852
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RedHammer/pseuds/RedHammer
Summary: Kylo is woken one night in his new quarters by a disturbance in the Force. It's a signature older and better known to him than any other. As little as he wants to think about, let alone speak to the scavenger again, he is forced to bridge their minds if he wants answers.But grief and shock gives a voice to parts of himself he'd prefer stayed silent.One-shot set immediately post The Last Jedi.





	A Star's Cycle

The silence of his new quarters was deafening. 

He’d had to take Snoke’s old rooms, anything else was impossible if he wanted to seize his authority over the Order without modification. They’d been stripped and gutted as another symbolic disemboweling of the old ways, but Kylo owned almost nothing with which to fill them again. Just silence.

The complete absence of sound exerted itself on the yawning, barely-furnished chambers like a physical law, oozing relentlessly outwards until every surface was absorbed. The presence of his old master lived in that void, and it encroached on the bounds of his body whenever he stepped inside. It was eating him, cell by cell.

He never slept more than fifteen minutes in a row, not anymore, not since the night he’d learnt that sleep was the perfect time for your enemies to approach and strike. He dozed in fretful fits and starts, the alarm hardwired in his brain yanking him back to wakefulness whenever he drifted into vulnerability. Usually he used the time to read battle histories, prepare orders, strategise fleet maneuvers. Sometimes he just stared at the unlit ceiling.

The thick, vengeful silence meant that his heartbeat gushed in his ears as if he were being perpetually drowned. There was no escaping the pulsing reminder of his own existence. The feeling reminded him of one of his early lessons, when Snoke had strapped him to a chair under a slowly melting ice block for three days and let the drips patiently torture him into madness.

Any disturbance to the measurement of the dragging, bleak hours of nothingness stood out like a slash of yellow paint against an exterior hull. So one night when the Force oscillated with a tiny, barely perceptible ripple, akin to someone planetside trying to get his attention by waving to him in orbit, it was as if there had been a bang on the wall. 

He sat up, fogged with drowsiness. A Force signature so familiar he could rarely sense it consciously. It was a part of his structure like digestion and breath - unnoticeable, integral. And like those two things, he’d never existed without it.

“Mom?” he slurred, ten years old again for a moment and wondering if he’d heard her coming in to his room.

And then his body began to disintegrate.

To call it pain was a useless description. It felt like the fabric of his form was coming apart. Something that had once been vital to his continued presence in the physical world was being divided from his being and it was excruciation unlike any he’d ever known. It was as if all his limbs had died and withered while still attached.

He rolled out of bed in a mindless attempt to run and collapsed to the ground like a stone, lungs unable to draw and brain barely more functional. Every nerve shrieked in unison as they were brutalised. His heart began to thrash and spasm like a doe caught in a snare, and acidic bile was ejected onto the floor from his stricken stomach. Panicked, he hauled himself forward, trying instinctively to right himself, jaw locked in rictus, slippery fingers grabbing at the smooth black walls of his quarters as if he'd been buried and was trying to claw his way out from under the earth.

He had to breathe. He had to function.

Even in this moment of annihilation, finding the bridge inside himself was easy. It was a glowing tether of energy that sat idle in the back of his head and served to mock him in his weaker, more introspective moments. It represented carelessness. The residual artefact of the one time, and most definitively the only time, he’d ever let himself come close to trusting another with his hopes. It was not a mistake that would be repeated.

But for now, it was a necessary evil. He rammed his Force down the bridge with his last meagre crumbs of strength, willing that it was enough to stir her power and create a response. He knew he didn’t have enough in him to try again.

Within seconds, he saw her. Laying in a cramped bunk, breathing evenly in the depths of a REM cycle. Even as he fought for sips of air, he felt rage’s familiar tide roll through his guts. She slept so easily, apparently.

“Wake up,” he rasped.

Her eyelids opened. He saw the first question about his current state taking shape on her lips and cut it off.

“Get to Leia. _Now._ ”

She was moving before she was fully conscious, staggering out of her bunk and calling her saber to her hand.

And then he had to wait. Feeling nothing but the pain vibrating in his atoms. Refusing to acknowledge what it meant. Unable to do anything except uselessly watch the dim, warm signature that had existed since his genesis, the tiny spark that had been the very first thing his brain ever knew, the most invariable constant of his reality.

Watching as it shrank, and shrank. And was gone.

The scavenger came back into her bunkbed, and his quarters. Her face was a shining river. 

“No,” Kylo argued with angry breathlessness against the concept her tears were proposing. He heaved himself upright with the gut-wrenching effort of a paraplegic, sweat pouring down his temples.

She crouched in front of him. “I’m sorry,” she hiccupped in a short, broken whisper, the way you apologised to someone before you reluctantly sliced open their throat.

“ _No,_ ” he repeated irately as he fought for oxygen, as if she was being offensive and inappropriate. He refused to believe it. There were some things that were possible, and some that were not. It was not possible that his mother had been alive twenty minutes ago, and now was not. That was just not a truth he was prepared to accept.

“She was -” The scavenger furiously wiped a handful of water off her nose and eyes, though it did nothing to remove the gurgle in her throat. “In bed. They came in through the ceiling, we think. There was - it was too late when they found her.” Her voice was battered. Wretched. He didn’t want to hear it. The transition to past tense so immediately. The instantaneous and devastating grief.

“Check again,” he wheezed as he began to hyperventilate. “She’s not dead.” Kylo grabbed her shoulder with damp, shaking fingers, squeezing the muscle until her bones were shifting and his hand couldn’t contract any harder. He wanted to shake her violently until she started making sense, because this wasn’t right. It couldn’t be right. Leia’s existence and the existence of gravity, oxygen, and all the governing laws of the universe were one and the same. She couldn’t be dead because the galaxy hadn’t collapsed in on itself.

“Ben, I - I’m so sorry -”

 _‘Stop saying that’_ , he tried to say, but it came out as a strange, thin, screaming wail instead. He couldn’t think of what else to do, so he did it again, and then he couldn't stop. Dimly, far away, he was aware that she was holding him upright and sobbing a mantra of desperate apologies into his shoulder, but he couldn’t recognise her voice anymore. There was nothing except the black hole where that tiny spark used to live, and the apocalyptic agony excavating his chest.

Eventually he was hollow. There was nothing left to consume. The pain had milled him down to the bones and then destroyed those too. His throat, along with the rest of him, was a numb, shredded husk.

There was noise. His brain remembered the shape of the noise but not the meaning. His eyes turned towards it, trying to recognise what she was saying. Pinging for a response returned a vast blankness.

He saw her face crumple anew when he looked at her. He didn't know why. There was nothing to cry about in a void.

She was lifting him up under the arms, trying to heave him onto his bed. Again, he didn’t know why. The floor and the bed were the same. Breathing or not breathing was the same. There would be no difference if he was shattering in the vacuum of space, or being reduced to his quantum components in the core of a sun. Everything was the same now, because nothing was the same. 

Existence or non-existence. He couldn’t tell them apart anymore and it didn’t matter enough to try.

“You’re not going to die.”

She must’ve gotten him up to the bed somehow, because he blinked and when his vision connected to his brain for a moment, he realised it was sideways. The scavenger was sitting on his sheets, looking down at him and fiercely swallowing sobs.

He didn’t understand what she meant. He was already dead, wasn’t he? Why did it matter if he died?

“You’re not dead, and you’re not going to die!” she shouted. His second realisation was that her grip on his upper arm was as hard as a docking clamp. His third was that the mechanism of his voice and lips were still capable of speech without any higher input, and he’d been speaking out loud.

“Why not?” he asked, his curiousity reaching out like a mote of light travelling billions of parsecs to land on a surface so far away it might as well have originated in another timeline.

She leaned in. Her skin was chequered with blotches of red and white, as if her blood had forgotten how to distribute itself evenly, and every square cubit of her face below her eyeline was drenched in fluids. She looked waylaid, like someone had cut off her foot and she knew her life had been altered permanently by the loss. 

“Because this was your Order.” Her fist curled up the material of his shirt, and she used it to shake him more effectively. “They're hidden in there somewhere, Ben. You’re going to find who did this.”

He shook his head. Those were all words and concepts that had weight attached to them, and he was weightless now. He was somewhere far, far away, and he had no intention of returning. 

She glanced up. “I can’t, Poe,” she said brusquely to the wall above his head. She paused, taking a violent sniff, and he idly watched the contortions of her brow. “Because I just can’t right now, damn it!” She looked back down at him again, a fresh wave of pain surging up her expression. “I know, but it’s important,” she said with a quiet, pure misery. “Tell Finn I’ll explain later. _Please._ ”

He picked up the hand on the sheets in front of him and started examining the fingers attached to it. “Are you leaving?” he asked, not sure how or why he did. His voicebox and tongue just spasmed without direction.

“No,” he heard. “I won’t leave you alone like this.”

“Are you real?” It didn’t matter either way.

She pressed her forehead into his shoulder for a moment. “I’m real,” she mumbled into his collarbone. “And so are you.”

He wasn't. He was an abstraction in a capsule, far out in space. A pristine, sealed capsule that would drift for aeons if nothing interrupted its course. There was a perfect, beautiful silence inside its walls, and it would be the simplest thing he’d ever done to go to sleep. He could quietly turn into dust. It was the only thing he knew how to want anymore.

“Can you hear me? Ben?”

But there was something tapping outside that wouldn’t let him bask in the paralytic nothingness. 

He slowly got to an elbow. He could see and hear, but the information wasn’t finding an endpoint. “Where is this?” he asked thickly, frowning in effort as if trying out the words for the first time. He heard himself speak as if he were listening to a recording, instead of sounds produced in his own skull.

She slid off the bed and knelt in front of him, face level with his own. “You’re in -” she craned her head as she looked over her shoulder, taking in the angled ceiling and vast tracts of emptiness. “I think they’re your quarters.”

He felt a pressure running from his elbow to his wrist and back again. It took several long moments to connect the sight of her arm moving to the feeling. 

There was a stinging, jagged tear in his dreamstate that pulsed with an urgent need for clarification. “My mother is dead?” he whispered, voice small as a child being buffeted in a crowd of tall strangers.

Her eyes closed as she bowed her head, unable to look at him for a moment, and her whole body moved with a heavy, silent sob. She lifted her head to meet his gaze with her teeth holding back a shivering lower lip.

“Yes,” she choked out. Another flood freshened up the salt crust drying on her face. “Your name is Ben Solo, Leia Organa was your mother, and someone killed her about an hour ago.”

Mother. Leia. Killed. The words were starting to trickle in through the capsule’s seal, first in drops and then a steady stream. He recognised them. They meant things that were going to bind him to torture every waking moment. But the capsule was already breached.

“Who killed her?” He looked at the being he recognised as the scavenger. His trust of everything she said was inherent and he didn’t question why that was so for an instant. Somehow even when his intellect been whittled down to the instinctual nub he knew that the things she said were true, were true.

“Someone in your Order. The First Order. You’re their- their _Supreme Leader._ ” She spoke the title like it was a piece of gristle she resentfully refused to swallow.

Supreme Leader. Those two words pulled on a thread that vibrated deep in his consciousness. 

“Snoke is the Supreme Leader,” he whispered in fearful confusion.

“No,” she said tearfully, shaking her head. “No, Ben. You killed Snoke, remember? I was with you.”

He remembered. He was remembering other things too. Something was accessing hidden drives, waking up system architecture that had slept in a long dormancy.

“Finally free.” The red curtains on fire. “I saw the future. I had to convince her to stay.”

“I didn’t,” she said quietly.

“She didn’t.” He closed his eyes, frowning as he tried to string together the fragmented wisps materialising in the white vacancy. “Her power was greater than mine and she went back to Leia. She didn’t need me.”

“Need you?” She was blinking hard and sniffling, a deep and confused crease drawing up her brow. “That’s not- you weren’t asking- you wanted me to be your co-leader. That’s what it was.”

He could hear himself saying those words, but the memory riled at the inaccuracy. It didn’t fit together. The trickle of data was starting to amass into a rushing flood, and the entity that was ‘Rey’ was characterised differently everywhere he looked. Rey in the forest. Rey in the snow. Rey next to a fire somewhere. Rey occupying the same spaces in the universe next to his parents and uncle he would have been occupying if events hadn’t diverged irreparably long ago. Rey and her infinite capacity for Light. Rey in most of his waking thoughts. Rey closing the door to the Falcon.

“No. It was-" At first the miserable ache had been perpetual, self-sustaining, there was nothing she hadn't infected, he was breathing her spores in off the ship walls. He conjured her spectre in the med-bay, watching his defeated carcass being sewn back together, he convinced himself she would've sneered and rejoiced at the sight- here again in the interrogation chamber, this corridor layout was the same as Starkiller, too easy for rats to hide in a maze, he should have had every panel pulled from the walls when she escaped, security patrols were still pathetically lax on these floors, yet another failure of- he peeled the healing strip once and spent an hour just looking into a mirror with his brain turned off- 

"It was different even though I didn't want it to be. I touched her hand. I didn't want to let the vision in, I knew the hope would poison me. Take me by the throat.” There was something black, something enraged in the maelstrom dragging the memories away, trying to keep the truth out of reach. He clutched at the wavy images before it all turned to smoke. “I was angry at how much I wanted to see her again. Resented it. I wanted to hold her hand in the turbolift in case Snoke killed us. To go somewhere dark and hidden so I could sit next to her for as long as I wanted, instead of fighting and dying. Didn't know why I wanted that, never wanted it before, didn't know how to say it, couldn't even if I did.”

The words came out as a long, unbroken cord, unspooling out of a hole they’d been coiled inside for too long. That sounded better. That rang with truth.

She had stopped crying. When he looked at her, he saw something he recognised easily. Aghast dismay. Fear.

Reality snapped back into place like a rubber band stretched too far.

“You’re not yourself. You’re in shock.” She spoke calmly, though her eyes were wildly bright. She patted his shoulder as if trying to persuade him back into sense, encouraging him to retract his words.

Rey. _This_ was Rey. He knew that again. And because if she was Rey, then Leia was dead and nothing mattered anymore, he leaned over and pushed his mouth clumsily against hers.

Soft and salty. She made a little noise in her throat that made his lips vibrate. A single, eternal second passed before she shoved him savagely away. 

“ _No,_ ” she denied, forcefully calm with a tinge of panic around the edge. "You’re not thinking right, you don’t see me this way. You'd never - you _can't._ ”

“I do. I hate it," he answered, soft and frantic. "It's- it's _wrong_ , value should be attached only to ideas, people are too weak, untrustworthy-"

“It's just the trauma confusing you! You’re having a reaction, that’s ammph-”

He cut off the rest of her response with another fumbling kiss. He put a hand on the side of her neck, desperate to keep her from yanking her head out of range, using a thumb to stroke aimlessly at the underside of her jaw in some half-crazed notion that would work on her like it did on a bolting tauntaun. She made another muffled sound of protest, but she didn’t move away. For twenty electric seconds, their mouths moved together in amateurish desperation, and he felt her hand alternate between hovering light and uncertain over his burning ear and squashing it flat to his skull.

She broke off from his lips with a sucking gasp as if she’d just surfaced from a long dive. “No, no, nope, this isn’t right,” she declared in a rattling half-singsong, vigorously shaking her head and arching her neck to break the proximity of their faces and hands. When she saw him start to edge forward again, eyes lowered with anxious yearning, she gripped his shoulders and pushed until they were a firm, civilised distance apart. 

“Ben. _Think._ ” Her eyes screwed closed for a moment and she took a deep, fortifying breath, as if reacting to a physical blow. “Remember who I am.”

He felt weak. Dizzy. The pressure changes in his head were promising to knock him out any second. There was a version of himself that was descending rapidly, about to draw an iron shroud over the events of tonight. Locking it down and chopping it up until it was unrecognisable and no longer a threat to this soft, miserable identity full of half-started wishes - _if I just, if she would, what if I, could she ever_ \- but it was only like this he could see the truth. He had to speak quickly before the divider walls came down again on his memories and the chance was lost forever.

“I know exactly who you are. I always have. My opposite and only equal. Everything rotten and silent in me is alive and thriving in you. You should've ended me on Starkiller and if I'd been you, I would have done it without hesitation." He shook his head, jaw tight over scraping molars, trying to untangle the anxious, garbled thicket of words that kept knotting up in his throat. "The fragility I can't stomach, need to carve out of me, you defend at a price I could never pay. I could never leave a dangerous enemy alive, but you can. It's- you look _at_ me, sharp and clear. Past Snoke's tool, or Luke's failure. Whatever monstrosity I really am, you're the only one who knows it. I never have. You're the only one who's ever- I want to be advised by you. Balanced. Your mind is so sure and strong that any who stand near you become surer and stronger. You impose thought and justice on chaos even when you have no incentive to do it." He was rambling, useless, he had no practice with verbosity but there was no luxury of a dry run before _this_ , the live-fire exercise he had been so sure would never come to pass.

She looked like she was about to speak. It would be a swift denial, a firm insistence on the reinstatement of their cold, balanced animus, a kindly, pitying contradiction laced with quiet disgust.

"And I wanted to give you-" he quickly cut her off, cowardly. "I want the galaxy to know what you really are, not the scavenger you were. Knowledge, respect, a fleet to command, a- a companionship, whatever you needed. I know you’ve got nowhere to go back to and neither do I. To the rest of them, we’re nothing. Except when we’re standing next to each other. I -” He grabbed her hands. Frustration was making his throat thick. He could only call out from behind the bars for so long. “Whoever you were calling 'Ben' doesn't exist, but I wanted to pretend he did if it meant you'd keep saying it. I loathed it, it was weak, like he was. I _can't be_ that weak again." Words kept stacking into piles of impotent nothing. He shook his head viciously, squeezing her palms until there was a sharp delineation between red and white on the nailbeds of his thumbs.

"No, _no,_ that's not important. There's- I keep- _wondering_ about you," he blurted out angrily, only able to say it to her hands, desperate and filter disintegrated. "I want to talk to you. I want to see you. I like- I like how your mouth moves. I like your voice. When you gathered in the Light for the first time, just before you gave me this scar, your eyes were- strong, and full, and- you had eighteen snowflakes on your face. I keep imagining you here, watching me do things. Training, or eating, or- sometimes I-I talk to you when you aren't- or reading reports together in b-" He halted, horrified. _Stop. Stop this humiliating garbage, stop letting her see how truly stupid you are, say something useful if you can manage it for once in your life, you brainless fool, you pathetic child, you monstrous nobody-_ "I think I’d give you everything in me if you wanted it. Everything. I want-" He broke off, raising his head to let out a sharp, clipped, angry groan before his eyes reattached her her knuckles. "I don't know! I don’t know how to say it-"

When the silence persisted and he chanced a glance upwards, he saw she'd turned a feverish, sweaty pink, mouth wedged shut in a bloodless line, face hard and round and nodding very quickly. Her breaths were coming heavily and measured through her nose. “Yes, you do,” she whispered firmly, the dried, watery tracks on her cheeks compressed into zigzags. “You do know how.” 

“Join me. Lead with me. We would be a force unlike any other -”

“Not that,” she interrupted, shaking her head. There was a tension in her too-bright eyes, as if she was perched on the edge of a cliff.

He felt his breath cease for a moment, along with light, and sound. There was a cracking, a realisation emerging from under a previously impregnable shell that was rapidly crumbling to dust.

"There's none of that in me," he said slowly. "It's why my parents couldn't- I've never been able to-" He broke off, unsure who he was convincing.

"You can. It's in you." On that, she sounded quietly confident. As always, he found himself trusting her knowledge of him above his own.

“Then-” He mouthed the words first, trying to close the seam between his two selves. “If that's what it is, then I could also be in love with you. Though I don't think that's possible,” he murmured haltingly.

“It's tricky,” she agreed. "But possible." The small tremble in her lips was absorbed when she stretched her neck and pressed them to his cheek.

His head was a thunderstorm as he tried to kiss back. Too much, too fast. He held onto the threads within reach, trying to keep grounded through practicality. 

“Will you come?” he asked in a taut whisper after they broke apart, pressing his forehead into hers as if he could transfer his perspective if he willed it hard enough. When he felt the shake he knew was coming, it knifed him all over again.

“I’ll never join the First Order. You know that,” she said lowly into the shared space between their faces. Her voice was forlorn.

His veins boiled with disappointment. “You won’t join the side that would grant you endless power? Power to reshape the galaxy to your own will, to _obliterate_ the old ways that made you suffer! To dismantle the structure of the universe that lets the Plutts and Skywalkers grind you into the dirt!” He paused, sucking in a harsh lungful through his teeth. He was saying it wrong. “And - _I’m_ here, and I’d - we’d be -” He trailed off in hopeless, writhing dismay. 

She looked at him with uncertainty, as if trying to recognise someone she’d never met. She reached up and he felt her gingerly, cautiously touching his hair, pushing it off his sweat-soaked forehead, fingernails sliding softly over the follicles.

“Sometimes, it feels like there’s two of me,” she said with the same quietness. “Travelling in parallel next to each other but never able to meet. One is the me as I am, and the other is the me I imagine. This -” Her eyes narrowed at the wall over his shoulder, staring into the distance as she grasped for her meaning. “- this other me who joined you and turned away from the Resistance. Who isn’t lonely all the time.” Her hand fell away. "I imagine her often."

“It doesn’t have to be imaginary,” he cut in with breathless speed, trying to meet her eyes. “I’d fuel up my ship tonight. This hour. You’d be here in two day cycles.”

She closed her eyes, a strange, stuttering hum in her throat. “I've tried not to, really tried, but I keep seeing it. Over and over.”

His stomach clenched. “Tell me what you saw,” he breathed. 

“That you’d touch down on a dock out of sight somewhere. I’d sneak away quietly. You’d meet me on the bridge of your shuttle and we’d discuss plans. A different future, using the First Order to help people rather than crushing them under their thumb. How to stop the fighting. How we'd negotiate a permanent peace... somehow. I’d promise to lend you my power to do it and you’d promise to teach me everything you knew about the Force." Her eyes opened, and slid away. "And when we returned, we’d - go to your quarters, lock the door, and -” She broke off, hand over her mouth, shaking her head.

His vision was swimming. He felt like he was going to burst out of his skin. “Go on,” he rasped, swallowing around a bone dry throat. She shook her head again, letting the wretched silence elongate and with every passing moment he felt her doubt gaining strength, forcing her to retreat back from the edge of the murky, unknowable, terrifying lake they were both circling. He lunged after her, desperate to fall in, unable to jump on his own. “ _Please_ say it,” he begged in a thin, brittle whisper.

She dropped her hand and it curled into a white-knuckled fist, still not meeting his stare. “And then we'd- sit on your bed and talk, and... we could kiss, kiss for a while, and then... and then we'd touch each other. A bit. I don't know.” It was rattled off in one fast, choppy, embarrassed mumble, as if she hadn't been sure her bravery would last long enough for full sentences. Her eyes were darting in tiny increments between her fist, his wrist, the bedsheet, and nothing in particular, unable to linger in one place.

He sucked in a shuddering breath. Something electric was circuiting his body at light speed and threatening to derail at any moment. He wasn’t sure it was possible to slingshot between so many emotional extremes in one night and remain sane.

“Yes,” he managed to croak, voice turned to gravel. His eyes were glued to where her neck was being absorbed by a fierce red rash. “I've never..." _Don't tell her that, fool. Just because Snoke never let you forget it doesn't mean she needs to know._ He coughed, trying to un-gum his speech. "Yes. That would... happen.”

She let out a strangled sound, half-groan, half-yell. The heels of her palms ground into her eyesockets, and she shook her head while they were still buried. “No. It won't. It can’t be like that.”

“It can -” he began furiously.

“It _can’t!_ ” she cut him off explosively. When her hands lowered, her eyes were wet again. “No, it can’t,” she went on, drawing a long breath through her nose. “Don’t you see it? That's just running away. I don’t want to have to -” Her expression crumpled. “To be someone the Resistance looks to in grief while _I’m_ mourning Leia. They want me to stand in for the Skywalkers they’ve lost and I’ve got no idea how to do that. How could I possibly do that?” she asked in a whisper. “They’re going to want guidance from Luke’s padawan and I’m going to make a mistake that gets people killed.”

His heart lurched at her harrowed, hunted look. “Then join me. Join me _right now._ Leave all that behind.”

She shook her head slowly as her fear melted into deep, resigned sadness. “I wouldn’t be joining you. Just trying to escape.” She put her hand over the top of his on the bedsheet. “And that’s not the future I saw. The future where you turned. But I wish - I wish so badly those two parallel lines would meet.”

He looked down at her hand. He wanted to thrash, to scream, to tell her to go throw her vision off a cliff if it meant she’d just let it all fall away and live how she pleased. But he knew, with a sinking ache that joined the already cavernous hollow space inside him, that he wasn’t truly different. They were both chained in place no matter how much they strained. She would never pursue the goal of galactic transformation if the price was too high, and he could never give up the tool he needed to carry it out.

Besides, the First Order was populated entirely by schemes and moral compromise. No one knew better than him that her ethics were part of the bindings between her molecules. She could no more compromise them than she could give up breathing oxygen. She’d give her lifeblood to protect the Resistance and that sordid herd of small-minded vigilantes, without his mother to stop them, would suck her dry.

“You could still come back here,” she whispered with a tense hopefulness. She tightened her fingers.

His jaw worked, grinding his back teeth together. “No,” he said shortly. “More than ever, you know why not.”

She winced.

There was a fire starting to lick around the edges of the black hole in his head. A terrible inferno he knew would soon be using his mind and body for fuel.

“I have to hunt whoever killed her,” he declared, voice a knife edge. “I have to strip them, bone by bone, until they’re begging to die.”

She got off the floor and sat on the edge of the bed, hand still gripping the top of his.

“I don’t have any right to stop you. And I know you’re the only one who can find who did this.” A small, wounded sound pressed up against the back of her teeth. She hung her head, a bead of water falling out of her lashes and leaving a small dot on his sheets. “But I should be more honest, even if it's not - you’re the only person I’ve ever really known like this and who’s ever really known me. I can’t -” She shook her head, biting her lip. Her other hand came to join the first in squeezing his knuckles. “They’re all gone now," she whispered. He heard the confused Jakku orphan buried in there, as if the pain of finally gaining acceptance and nurture and having it yanked away was so grotesquely cruel that even she couldn't understand it. "Not you too. Not now. I couldn’t bear it-” She choked, disintegrating into heartbroken tears. 

He felt pierced. Filled up with an insane desire to alleviate her pain, and also with the dangerous, heady illusion that maybe, in the infinite reaches of maybe, she could one day feel about him what he felt about her. It wasn’t something that had ever really occurred to him, even in the darkest and most unchallenged hours of his dreams. But hope, the illicit and addictive narcotic that he couldn’t seem to stop relapsing into, flooded him once more.

She turned her head suddenly, removing a hand to swipe roughly at her face. “I know, Finn. I’ll try and think of something to say. Just a few more minutes.” She paused, trying to rearrange her expression into something approaching certainty. “It’s going to be alright. We’ll find a way to push on. You know Leia wouldn’t want us to fall apart. Just - please, just give me a few more minutes and I’ll be there.”

After a moment, she glanced back at him, eyes flooded. All traces of strength fell away to expose the rawness underneath. Only he got to see it, the way her full heart turned against her in sorrow and cornering doubt, and he knew he was the only one who would ever understand what it was to be one with the Force in a time of crisis. When all eyes pressed in expectantly, waiting for either miraculous deliverance or the confirmation of your banal, disappointing mortality.

He saw her, like she saw him. That understanding was the most precious gift they could give each other. That sight was all they had. 

He sat up quickly and slid his arms around her waist, dragging her into his chest and against his lips. She looped her arms around his neck and their tongues wound together urgently, drinking in each others comfort and acutely aware of the seconds slipping away. His hands ran restless routes over her back, her shoulders, the nape of her neck, trying desperately to memorise the feel of her muscles as he melted under her soft mouth. He needed to remember this as accurately as possible, and use it as a talisman of protection when he was hurled into the rapidly approaching gauntlet of fire and blood.

She pulled away. “I've got to go,” she said brokenly. 

He shook his head quickly in futile defiance, the action sweeping his nose against her hairline, and ducked his head to connect their mouths again. She kissed back just as hard, hands gripping his shoulders and whimpering almost inaudibly. After only a few, golden seconds, she pushed him backwards.

He refused to uncage her from between his arms. “Rey,” he murmured hopelessly against her cheek. “I meant it. About loving you.”

She brought a hand up to his jaw and put a tender, bruising kiss on the corner of his mouth. “I know,” she whispered. She surged up off the bed and broke his hold, her hand trailing warmth on his face for half a second as she looked down at him with a sad, wondrous expression. And then she was gone.

The room was dark again. The silence rushed back in to fill the vacuum instantaneously. His chest and arms were already cool, projected warmth having no resilience against the hard rules of reality.

His fists squeezed on empty air. His mother had died in him with a supernova cataclysm, and the explosions had shed most of his emotional mass to leave only the hardest, purest elements behind. Now there was only him, and Rey, and the black hole he had to close.

He swung himself off the bed, saber whipping to his hand. He punched a button on the wall.

“Hux,” he snarled. “Tell me where he sleeps.”

**Author's Note:**

> RIP, beloved Princess Carrie. I hope they do your exit justice. 
> 
> This started out as imagining the first scene of the next movie and then Reylo exploded everywhere. Hope you enjoyed it.


End file.
